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Is government surveillance encouraging internet self-censorship?

Do you avoid voicing your opinions online? Perhaps you refrain from posting controversial political opinions in case of a potential backlash from friends, work colleagues or even strangers who hold a perceived majority view compared to your own view? According to a recent study, Under Surveillance: Examining Facebook’s Spiral of Silence Effects in the Wake of NSA Internet Monitoring, published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, government surveillance of the internet could be responsible for the self-censorship of online opinions.

The 'spiral of silence': why we don't always say what we mean on social media

Ever since the doors were flung open on the National Security Agency’s domestic snooping program by Edward Snowden in 2013, the vast majority of American citizens and overseas nationals are no longer strangers to their government monitoring and storing their online activities. According to the study, which uses the ‘spiral of silence’ theory (where people stay silent when their views are perceived to be the minority), government surveillance could be responsible for ‘stifling the expression of minority political views’ online.

Freedom of speech vs Government surveillance

255 people volunteered for the online study spearheaded by Elizabeth Stoycheff - assistant professor at Wayne State University. During the first stage of the study, all participants were asked about their political beliefs, personality traits and media use. Next, 121 out of 255 respondents in the group were reminded that their online activities are monitored by the U.S. government.

All participants were then shown a fictional Facebook post about US airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and asked to ‘imagine that they came across it in their news feeds’. They were then asked for their opinion on the story and to publicly express their views on it, and how they thought other Americans would feel about it.

If you thought the select number of respondents who were reminded that their online activities were being monitored by the U.S government suppressed their views publicly, you’d be correct. The study found that this ‘significantly reduced the likelihood of speaking out in hostile opinion climates.’ The study also found that respondents who believed they held the majority opinion were much more likely to express their opinions.

"The adoption of surveillance techniques, by both the government and private sectors, undermines the Internet’s ability to serve as a neutral platform for honest and open deliberations. It begins to strip away the Internet's ability to serve as a venue for all voices, instead catering only to the most dominant,” says Elizabeth Stoycheff lead researcher of the study at Wayne State University.

Afraid of backlash on Facebook and Twitter

A study by the Pew Research Centre conducted in 2014, entitled Social Media and the Spiral of Silence found that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter could actually encourage self-censorship. The study indicates that while people are very concerned about the NSA leaks, they aren’t comfortable with airing their opinions about the agency on Facebook. 86% of Americans surveyed said they were happy to discuss it in person, but only 42% of Twitter and Facebook users would post it online.

There have been other studies to back the fear that government surveillance programs are stifling freedom of expression and one study found that people ‘might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain things just to avoid seeming suspicious.’

This particular study Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use by Oxford Phd candidate Jonathon W. Penney, ‘explores how traffic to Wikipedia articles on topics that raise privacy concerns for Wikipedia users decreased after the widespread publicity about NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations in June 2013.’ The study found that, due to the repercussions of the Edward Snowden document leaks, people have changed the way they used the internet.

The following is an excerpt from the study “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use:

‘Using the total article views as of May 2013 (2,960,778), this decrease represents an immediate drop-off just under 20%. This suggests that the revelations in June 2013 caused a sharp and sudden decrease in traffic that may be characterized as a chilling effect. More importantly, however, is that after June 2013, there is not only a large and immediate drop in views but also a statistically significant change in the overall trend in the month-to-month views of the Wikipedia articles. Rather than increasing on a monthly basis, the trend after June 2013 has completely changed. Due to the statistically significant decrease of 63,593 monthly views, the overall data trend has shifted an increase of 30,367 views per month to a decrease of 33,226 per month. This is important because it means that the NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations not only caused a sudden chilling effect, but also caused a longer term, possibly even permanent, decrease in web traffic to the Wikipedia pages studied.’

Speaking to The Washington Post, Penney said: "You want to have informed citizens... if people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate."

Do you feel truly free online?

How many times have you thought about airing your opinion online and decided against it? What stopped you? Fear of government surveillance, or that your view is perceived as a minority one? One of the hot topics that flooded popular social media sites, was the US presidential election. Whether you were in favour of Trump or Clinton why should you have to pull back in fear of what others will say? Shouldn’t we be able to voice our opinions, regardless of whether our friends or others agree or disagree with us?

Let’s not forget that we are lucky enough to enjoy freedom of speech unlike many of those living in countries such as North Korea. Why do we deny ourselves our fundamental human right to voice our own opinions?

Many internet users are still concerned that their browsing activity is monitored by their government, their ISP or other third parties. One piece of software that you can use to maintain anonymity online is a Virtual Private Network (VPN). When you connect to any one of +940 VPN servers we offer at Hide My Ass! Pro VPN, you are assigned one of our IP addresses, your connection is encrypted and you can browse the internet anonymously and securely.